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“Once in a while, you’ll read somebody’s résumé and you’ll think, ‘Wow, that guy is a lot smarter than I am,’” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) told Moniz, who has won the respect of both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. “Unlike climate change, this is a matter of fact, not speculation.”

The exchanges between Moniz and Republicans were the latest indication that even if the debate over climate change is largely settled in much of the scientific community, it’s still alive in the halls of Congress. And it underscores the fact that President Barack Obama’s climate change agenda, which the administration is expected to unveil next month, is destined to face vehement opposition from the GOP.

Several Republicans pressed Moniz about what percentage of climate change can be attributed to human activity, rather than natural variances.

“Is there any way to estimate what percent? Is it over half? Fifty percent, 90 percent of human activities?” Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) asked.

Moniz, echoing the sentiments of the vast majority of climate scientists, said climate change can be attributed largely to human activity, though he said he did not know the exact percentage.

“In my scientific view, what we are seeing is consistent with being driven by manmade activities,” he said. “Basically, my statement is based on the fact that if one simply looks at what one knows and one has known for over a century about how CO2 in particular drives global warming through the greenhouse effect. We know how much CO2 we emit from combustion and we know how much CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere and we know the time trajectory of those.”

During the hearing, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) asserted that the recent discovery of a ship wrecked in a large storm a century ago in the Great Lakes shows that extreme weather has always existed and is not being exacerbated by climate change.

“It was interesting that we had such a massive storm in 1910, which indicates that we are not now going through massive storms that are any different than massive storms that we had in the past,” Rohrabacher said.

Moniz countered there is no doubt climate change is occurring and it poses “very, very considerable” risks. But he said it’s less clear exactly how climate change affects specific, local weather patterns.

“The more one goes into localized expectations of consequences, the more scientific debate there is,” he said, stressing that the bigger-picture consequences of climate change are very real and temperature increases are clearly visible in the scientific data. “The macro is just clear by counting.”